Posted on 05/05/2010 9:09:50 PM PDT by Syncro
Well, isn’t this quite the twist of events. Obama was the top recipient of donations from BP in 2008, and it looks like he favored them after all. He let BP’s gulf drilling be exempt from an environmental study last year.
The Interior Department exempted BP’s calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely.
The decision by the department’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP’s lease at Deepwater Horizon a “categorical exclusion” from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 — and BP’s lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions — show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf.
The Obama administration?? Unprepared? NEVER!
*snip*“The agency’s oversight role has devolved to little more than rubber-stamping British Petroleum’s self-serving drilling plans,” Suckling said.
BP has lobbied the White House Council on Environmental Quality — which provides NEPA guidance for all federal agencies– to provide categorical exemptions more often.
I am just shocked, shocked, I tell you, that the Obama administration would rubber stamp BP’s drilling plans!
Now, coincidentally, he’s got a ready-made excuse to throw his association with BP under the bus. And Obama also has an excuse to curtail offshore drilling, which is great for him. He was always against offshore drilling and exploration. He only budged on the issue to try to win brownie points with voters. With this oil spill, he can go right back to being ardently against it. How convenient.
Basically, we all need to calm down on the hyperventilating. Obama, if he actually cares about the good of the country, should not stop further offshore drilling exploration or make current offshore drilling more burdened by red tape.Whadda ya mean WE??As for the rest of us, this is just another lesson in what happens when we elect a corrupt, amateur politician with no experience who practices in cronyism and dirty politics.
There is more at the link, it’s a pretty long article
Is BP = Barak Petroleum?
One of Jack Squat’s largest campaign donors: BP........
Hard to tell
Does he own BP, or do they own him?
Paid in full:
Obama was the top recipient of donations from BP in 2008
What kind of games are these people playing?
From January 30, 2009:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday visited the Lakewood office of the scandal-rocked Minerals Management Service, which he now oversees.
Salazar, who until recently was a U.S. senator from Colorado, said Tom Strickland, his chief of staff, would lead a fresh probe of the conduct of some MMS employees as part of a review of Interior Department ethics rules.
Strickland is a former U.S. attorney for Colorado; Salazar is a former state attorney general.
“The American people ... have lost trust in the Department of the Interior, where ethical lapses and criminal behavior have extended to the highest levels,” Salazar told MMS employees at the Lakewood Federal Center, according to a transcript provided by his office.
“The former deputy secretary of this department went to prison,” Salazar said. “The public associates this department with Jack Abramoff. And the public knows of what happened here in Lakewood.”
MMS manages mineral resources on federal lands and collects royalties from mineral extraction. Last year it oversaw collection of $23 billion in mineral royalties.
Several local MMS employees were dismissed or punished in 2008 amid accusations that they took gifts from energy-industry executives, and that some used drugs or had sex with them. Critics of the agency called the scandal a sign that federal energy regulators have been too cozy with the industry they oversee.
http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/01/26/daily56.html
Guess there has been no change, except now the oil industry is not in bed with the regulators, just the President.
BP-big contributor to the ‘bammer’s campaign. Think about how the MSM would be flogging that story if the ‘bammer was GWB.
bump for later
me too
Obama’s playing good cop, bad cop.
Exempted? Way to keep the jack-boot on their necks, Obama.
isn’t granting exemptions from things in exchange for political contributions illegal?
just sayin’
What did Obama know and when did he know it.
The top recipient of BP-related donations during the 2008 cycle was President Barack Obama himself, who collected $71,000.
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